One of the spring's most buzzed-about debuts, Bill Cheng's Southern Cross the Dog is the story of Robert Chatham, who was just 8 when the 1927 Mississippi flood destroyed his home and his family. As Robert wanders the Delta, in search of his kin and trying to outrun bad luck, Cheng creates a truly American story that mingles myth, music and a little bit of magic.

Writers are often admonished to write what they know, but you did the opposite with Southern Cross the Dog. You're a Chinese American from New York City; your characters are black and white Southerners from rural Mississippi. Why did you decide to set a novel in the South?

You have to write toward your interests. For me that was the Mississippi Delta of the great country blues singers. When I was a teenager I listened a lot to blues musicians like Robert Johnson, Son House, Big Bill Broonzy, Mississippi John Hurt. There was something about that music—the frustration, the melancholy, the resignation but also this great joy—that resonated with me. When it came time to write my first novel, I knew I wanted it to pay tribute to that world.

What kind of research did you do to help you establish the place and the characters' vernacular?

As a reader, the expectation I have for fiction is that the story be credible without it being obliged to hew too closely to fact. That’s where the real joy is in telling stories—asserting a reality that doesn’t exist and blurring the boundaries between what we believe and what is actual. For me, the research is a means of communing with the novel, fleshing out its contours and seeing what images the brain is pulled towards.

The more I read, the more tools I have. You never know when you’ll need to summon up Chandler or Shakespeare or Springsteen in the treacherous back swamps of the Delta.

Everything short of boarding a plane, I did—I went to the library; pulled old photos out of digital collections; summoned up land masses on Google Maps; read books by folklorists and ethnomusicologists (notably Alan Lomax and John Work); listened to records; perused the radio archive at the Paley Center for Media in New York City; photocopied pages on dynamiting out of an old handbook; read Honeyboy Edwards’s memoir The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing; watched PBS; pulled up clips on YouTube of Mississippi John Hurt on Pete Seeger’s 1965 series Rainbow Quest; watched flood footage recorded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, listened to a recording of Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim and Sonny Boy Williamson talk about life during Jim Crow (“You didn’t say, ‘Give me a can of Prince Albert [Tobacco].’ Not with that white man on that can. You say, ‘Give me a can of that Mister Prince Albert.’”)

Most of that, however, never made it into the book. 

"Southern cross the Dog" is a colloquial term for the geographical point at which two railways intersect. Will you tell us more about the title and its significance?

Literally, there are two railroad lines that used to intersect in Moorehead, Mississippi—the U.S. Southern and the Y.D. or Yazoo-Delta line (colloquially referred to as the Yellow Dog). Apocryphally, the composer W.C. Handy first heard the phrase “Southern cross the Dog” at a train station in Tutwiler, Mississippi, in 1903. According to Handy’s account, he heard a black itinerant musician playing slide guitar and singing “Goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog.” The phrase was later adopted in his song, "The Yellow Dog Rag."

That’s really it as far as fact-based accounts go. But for me “Goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog” calls to mind something mythical—a place of peace and rest and final judgment. A coming home. A Beulah land.

The title also evokes other parts of blues folklore. There are the crossroads where souls are bargained for; there is the idea of being crossed or jinxed through hoodoo magic; there is the notion of dogs, particularly black dogs, as agents of the devil. This imagery shows up a lot, for instance, in the songs of Robert Johnson. It’s exotic and sexy and while there are definitely elements of those things in the book, the way I really think about the title today is that it is simply the story of a boy trying to come home.

The novel focuses on several different characters, and the story is mostly told in third person. But in two chapters, those focused on Dora and Ellis, you switch to first person. Why did you decide to switch between characters throughout the story, and how did you establish whose tales you would tell from the first-person perspective?

There are portions of this book that could only be told from the point-of-view of those characters. If I’d done otherwise, I would’ve been shirking my responsibility to those characters. From the beginning, I knew that Dora’s character would be the hardest for me to write. To render her convincingly I’d have to cross the divides of gender, race, as well as a history of abuse of which I have no first-hand experience. It was a challenge that I think tests the very core of who I believe myself to be as a writer. These are not easy things to write about, but I didn’t come here to write an easy book.

If I told Dora’s or Ellis’ story from the distance of the third-person, the book would be safer, certainly but that’s not what I think fiction should be. My characters—especially Dora and Ellis—experience a tremendous amount of loss. I owe it to them and the reader to try to understand and communicate that loss.

As a first-time author, what writers inspire you?

Depending on what I’m working on and how I’m conceiving it at the time, I’ll draw on different sources for my inspiration. For Southern Cross the Dog, I know Peter Mathiessen’s Shadow Country was hugely influential to me. It has the kind of scope and breadth that I wanted for my own book. There’s also Illywhacker by Peter Carey, which reminded me that books should also be thrilling and joyful and provocative to the imagination.

But when I’m working I try not to limit myself to any one kind of writing. Every book provides its own unique insight on structure, or syntax, or plotting or character development. The more I read, the more tools I have to fix the problems that might arise down the road. You never know when you’ll need to summon up Raymond Chandler or William Shakespeare or Bruce Springsteen in the treacherous back swamps of the Delta.

I will say, however, that a lot of how I think about fiction is informed by the novelist Colum McCann. I had the luck to study with him for my MFA. He really instilled in me this idea that when you write, you have to be unafraid. Every word you set down should be part of an ambitious undertaking—otherwise what would be the point?

I've read that you haven't visited the South, but your book tour includes stops in several Southern cities, so that's about to change. Is there anything you're particularly looking forward to seeing or visiting in the region in which your novel is set?

I’m not sure I’ll have much time to take in the sights, but there are a few things I’d definitely like to do. For instance, I’d like to spend an evening at a functioning jukejoint and listen to some live blues. I got married last year and my friends took me out to this tiny blues club for my bachelor party. They said the whole night I was like a puppy, looking up at the stage. It was like Christmas morning for me.

If I can, I’d also like to make it out to the Panther Swamp National Wildlife Refuge in Yazoo City—see how much of that I got right, how much I got wrong. My wife is also an avid bird-watcher so I think that’ll be something we’ll both enjoy.

What are you working on next?

A novel. At least I think it wants to be a novel. I can say that it’s not set in the American South and that it’s not about me—except in the way that every book is always about the author. With Southern Cross the Dog, the ambition was to make a book that was wide in scope. My inclination now is to go the other way. Something quieter and introspective, but no less ambitious.

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Read our review of Southern Cross the Dog.

Just how long did it take for debut novelist (and former journalist) Adelle Waldman to write her first novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.? “To be honest,” she says, speaking on the phone from her home in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, “this isn’t my first novel.”

About eight years ago, Waldman was freelancing in New York City while working on her actual first novel. "Except the thing that didn’t get done was actually writing it," she laughs. "I started to ask myself, ‘am I just an SAT tutor with a Word document on my computer?’ ”

When she turned 29, Waldman decided to move back to her parents' house in Baltimore for six months and finish the book. "I was just amazed that it had happened: I had made something with a beginning, middle and an end. I was so euphoric that I wasn’t able to properly assess its quality. I sent it out to agents but it didn’t have the reception that I had hoped for.”

Devastated, Waldman returned to freelancing until her then-boyfriend (now husband) told her to stop being sad and do something about it. So she picked up on an old idea and, three years later, completed The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. The story of the relationships of up-and-coming literary star Nathaniel (Nate) Piven, it’s a novel that brilliantly taps into the modern single-white-male psyche.

“It was something I wanted to explore,” Waldman says. “In the world I was setting the book in, there’s a type of guy I wanted Nate to be.” Selfish, narcissistic, vain—those are just a few of the words that could describe Waldman’s very realistic male protagonist.

Realism was a concern of Waldman’s while writing The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., a book that to some extent takes the 19th-century novel as its inspiration. Waldman describes her discovery of Eliot March’s Middlemarch at 20 as “life-changing.”

“I wasn’t well-read in the classics at the time. I was reading these contemporary books that were relatable, about a confused but plucky woman trying to fight obstacles in her path,” she says.

"Personally, I have a love/hate relationship with him.”

Enter Middlemarch, a book with the sort of psychological depth that was a revelation for Waldman. “Their motives, their thinking . . . I learned things about myself that weren’t the most flattering or attractive; I would see aspects of these qualities in [Eliot’s] characters.”

Which leads us back to Nate, whose attitudes toward both women and success might have some readers reacting strongly (and even negatively). Nate embodies the modern urban, educated, late 20s/early 30s male, complete with intimacy issues and a constant need for validation. “One of the things I wanted to do with this book was explore the psychology of Nate and make him feel real,” Waldman explains. “I tried to step back from the question of likability. I didn’t know what other people would think of Nate. I’ve gotten such different reactions to him! Personally, I have a love/hate relationship with him.”

And there’s good reason to have such a visceral reaction to Nate. Readers watch him fall in love with, then slowly become disinterested in, his charmingly cool girlfriend, Hannah. There’s no particular reason for the cooling of their relationship. Half the time, Nate gives more weight to how his friends perceive his girlfriend than to his own feelings for her.

In relationships, says Waldman, “there are these unattractive thoughts about status. In order to be realistic, to treat it seriously and analyze it, I had to get at things that are uglier.”

Speaking of feelings people don’t like to admit, we couldn’t help but ask her about one important passage in the book, where characters analyze the virtues of “masculine” versus “feminine” writing. Muses Nate, “the kind of writing he preferred seemed inherently masculine. The writers who impressed him weren't animated by a sense of personal grievance. (They were unlikely to, say write poems called ‘Mommy.’) . . ..[W]hen he read something he admired, something written today—fiction, nonfiction, didn't matter—there was about an 80 percent chance that a guy wrote it.”

Does Waldman know male writers who feel this way?

“Having been in Brooklyn for a while, around this literary world,” she says, “there were these discussions in the air. I wanted to address it plausibly. I felt there were things that [some] men think that they’re not going to admit to women—or in their own books—because it makes them look misogynistic.”

Waldman also reflects on how, as a female author, she doesn’t have the option of disregarding how her writing will be received. “I think about it all the time, because we have to,” she says. “Our writing gets pigeonholed as women’s writing.”

It would be a mistake to pigeonhole this unsentimental look at the tumultuous world of the young and single literary set. The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. resounds with brutal honesty. With a daring and original voice, Waldman reveals the inner workings of the “typical” guy in this powerful and intelligent novel.

Megan Fishmann writes from San Francisco.

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Read our review of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

Author Koren Zailckas, whose best-selling memoirs Smashed and Fury chronicled her troubled youth, again taps into her own life experiences—but this time, she’s writing fiction. Her debut novel, Mother, Mother, is the story of the Hurst family, whose perceptions of themselves have been twisted by the machinations of their narcissistic and overbearing matriarch, Josephine. We caught up with Zailckas to ask her a few questions about her debut.

Did you find it more difficult writing your first memoir (Smashed) or your first novel? How did the processes differ?

Smashed was probably the more difficult of the two. Before Smashed, I had only written poetry and interoffice memos, so I had absolutely no concept of pacing. All I had was youthful enthusiasm and the kind of poor boundaries that lead a person to overshare. I wrote the first draft in four months and it was at least twice as long as it was supposed to be. My editor really had to help me crack it open and find the book encased within this crazy word count. I guess you could say in Smashed, bingeing was both the subject and the process. I wrote it the same way I used to drink: with no sense of moderation.

By comparison, Mother, Mother was an exercise in restraint. Structurally, I was aiming for something that was a bit like Rebecca—one of those books where the sense of unease builds and builds until the moment of clarity (however twisted) feels like a perversely joyous relief.

That said, withholding information has never been part of my writing process. It took me a number of drafts to get the release valve just right—to find that place where the characters revealed their true colors slowly and organically.

I had an aha moment when I realized not all the Hursts could be self-aware because a narcissistic family doesn’t have a realistic self-image. From that point on, the book became more about finding the meeting place between the Hursts’ reality and their delusions of grandeur.

This story is told through the points-of-view of two of the Hurst children, William and Violet. Did you find that you struggled with either sibling’s voice, or did they both come naturally to you?

There were definitely moments when it was easier to tap into Violet than Will, and visa versa. But mostly, I felt like I could relate to them both. To me, Will and Violet represent the two dominant thought processes in the mind of anyone who’s had early life trauma.

Will is a little bit like the amygdala in people with post-traumatic stress disorder. He’s stuck in his childhood fear and he constantly feels like his safety is at risk.

Violet, on the other hand, has more intellectual understanding about why the people around her behave the way they do. But she can also be a little too scholarly and metaphysical about it. Violet is kind of a Buddhist punk, and by the time we meet her, she’s heavy into drugs and Eastern religions. She smokes pot, she meditates, she stands on her head. She’s desperately hunting for a coping mechanism—some jumble of Sanskrit words she can repeat to make all the self-hatred her mom instilled in her go away.

The irony is, each of them needs what the other has. Violet needs to tap into her painful feelings instead of transcending them. And Will needs to stop being ruled by his fear.

You might say that Josephine keeps her family in a perpetual “gaslight” state: anything she did to them, she later vehemently denies, convincing them it was all in their mind. Is this type of behavior common with narcissists?

Totally. Even if you see the method behind a narcissist’s madness—and that’s tricky to begin with, they leave a trail of confusion—it’s nearly impossible to confront them about anything. They’ll say it flat out didn’t happen. Or they’ll question your memory. Or they’ll say you’re the one who’s crazy. They’ll cry and rage. They’ll blame and demonize you, and likely rally as many supporters as they can to do the same. Narcissists are beyond reproach or compromise because they live in denial.

I used to think it was really calculating. But I realized, very recently, that they’re actually speaking their truth. Narcissists can be kind of dissociative. When their perfect image is threatened, they literally blank out and go somewhere else in their minds. One therapist explained it to me by saying, “They’re not thinking that they want to hurt you. They’re not thinking about anything at all.” Their emotional landscape is kind of like the static station on the TV. It’s not evil. It’s just kind of blank.

How much research did you do on Narcissistic Personality Disorder?

For the past three or four years, I tried to read everything I could find about personality disordered parents. There are a few very helpful titles out there.  Karyl McBride’s Will I Ever Be Good Enough? is one. Christine Ann Lawson’s Understanding the Borderline Mother is another. There are also some shocking examples of narcissistic parenting in Scott Peck’s People of the Lie.

NPD is a spectrum disease, meaning some people just have a few narcissistic traits and still others are full-blown malignant personalities. A lot of narcissists you meet are those people who give off the impression that how things look on the outside—the appearance of the family, or the company, or the marriage—are more important than the reality within. They’re also really great gossips. They control the flow of information. They pit people against each other. They choose to surround themselves with people who either bring them attention and status or people they can use as scapegoats for the negative emotions that don’t jive with the perfect image they’re trying to project.

But two things are really at the heart of the condition. One is grandiosity. Narcissists exaggerate their achievements and talents. With Josephine, you can see that in the way she pretends she’s this groundbreaking educator. The second is lack of empathy. Narcissists are biochemically incapable of putting themselves in other people’s shoes. Jo is pretty shameless in this latter respect. Faced with news of a cancer diagnosis, she sees no problem using it as an opportunity to bash the woman’s vegan lifestyle (Jo’s attitude is: “See, it just goes to show. . . . All those years of tofu and oat groats, all for nothing. I’ve always said that woman needed a steak.”)

In an age where woman are repeatedly told to lean in, and that they can have it all, do you find that mothers—more so than fathers—feel pressure from society to look perfect on the outside (balancing a home, work, family life and relationship) while they may be struggling on the inside?

I’m not sure our society demands perfection from mothers, but I do think it scares the bejesus out of us. It’s constantly trying to convince us that we’re unwittingly inflicting irreversible damage. You see that all the time in TV news headlines: “What are you packing in your children’s lunch that has the hidden potential to kill them? Find out tonight, during Fox at nine.”

Now that I’m a mother myself, I feel that panic. And I see this smothering self-doubt in my female friends with kids. It’s this fear that you’re going to mess your children up by way of not being informed. The Internet has a lot to do with it too. If our parents suffered from lack of parenting resources, we suffer from too many. There’s just so much unqualified, polarized information online and no one really knows what to do with all of it.

"My relationship with my mother has been the source of much of my life’s pain, and her relationship with her mother was a difficult one too, so I live in constant fear of perpetuating that legacy."

Get a group of mothers together, and the number one question you’re apt to hear is: “How concerned should I be?” How concerned should I really be about the arsenic in rice? About BPAs in cans? How concerned should I be that my toddler can’t say 20 words? What about the fact that my baby doesn’t sleep through the night?

The antidote to parental narcissism is entering your child’s world. Noticing them. Talking to them. Acknowledging their full range of emotional expression and letting them clue you in to their own distinct, individual needs. When you’re looking at a computer screen, it’s easy to neglect some of that.

At one point Edie says to Josephine, “Ask any farmer, they’ll tell you some moms just aren’t naturals. Having a baby doesn’t make you a mother any more than buying a piano makes you f***ing Beethoven.” Do you agree with that statement? Did you worry about your own ability to adapt to motherhood?

Definitely. My relationship with my mother has been the source of much of my life’s pain, and her relationship with her mother was a difficult one too, so I live in constant fear of perpetuating that legacy.

Also, from a really young age (like, I was still playing with dolls) my mother would tell me that I wasn’t maternal. In retrospect, it seems like a strange projection, something she was just working through on her own, but you don’t understand these things when you’re little. As a kid, you simply take it as fact. As a result, I shied away from babies and toddlers for a long time. I sort of felt like the woman in the psychiatric ward during Violet’s stay—the one who has an Edward Scissorhands complex, the one who wants to hold people but fears she’s going to maim them in the process.

It took me a long time (and a lot of therapy) to realize I wasn’t my mother, but at the end of the day, I still felt like I was missing the maternal handbook. The things I remembered my mother doing when I had play dates over were not the things I wanted to do with my own kids’ friends came over. The things I remembered my mother saying when I hurt myself were not the words I wanted to use to comfort my own kids.

But then, I realized I’ve had a lot of other kindness in my life to draw from. I’ve had really maternal teachers, aunts, uncles, second cousins, in-laws, friends. And those people inspire the way I relate to my kids. They’ve given me a lot of love to pass on. Collectively, they’ve taught me a lot about mothering.

You are very open about your difficulties with your mother. Were you worried that writing a book about an abusive mother figure would worsen your relationship?

It’s been about a year since I spoke to my mother. I wish her well, and I understand the way her upbringing gives her certain emotional limitations, at least in the way she relates to me. This isn’t one of those situations where I stopped talking to her because I didn’t get enough hugs as a kid. It was more like the present issues had become far too disruptive.

Hopefully, if she reads Mother, Mother she will recognize it’s fiction—a way to deal with real feelings by way of a fictionalized family and an imagined scenario. Somehow I doubt she’ll see it that way, but it’s the truth. Life is full of thorns, and I’m just trying the very best I can to tend my own garden. Writing is a survival mechanism for me. I can’t not do it. It’s the only way I know to make sense and meaning out of difficult things.

How much of your past addiction history—i.e. the need/desire to escape through drugs or alcohol—did you draw from when creating Violet’s character?

Well, drinking was my drug of choice. Violet is more into drugs, but I still drew quite a bit from my own addiction history. It’s taken me 10 years, but I see now what I couldn’t when I wrote Smashed: my home life was so painful, binge drinking was an attempt to kill myself in a way that seemed accidental and, even, socially acceptable (at least for a teenager or college student).

Violet’s drug use, in part, is about numbing out. No one in her family cares what she’s feeling—in fact, any expression of emotion gets her into trouble—so why should she acknowledge her despair, even to herself?

There’s also another reason Violet turns to drugs (and this is the truly sick one): on some subconscious level, she’s really trying to appease her unappeasable mom. Josephine is angry, she’s sick, she’s out of control. But being kind of emotionally stunted, Jo needs Violet around to act out those feelings for her.

Jo has left Violet with little choice except to be the “bad” Hurst. If, say, Violet swung the other way and tried to be an honor student, Jo would swoop in and take all the credit. If Violet went out for school sports, her mother would mock her. If she put more effort into the way she looked, her mother would accuse her of putting on airs. The Hursts need Violet to be a slacker and a problem. Without that low-level distraction, they’d be forced to confront the source of their issues. And no one in the Hurst family feels safe doing that.

What are you working on next?

I’ve got a few other psychological thrillers in the cooker. It’s strange the way imagining scary stories can feel almost healthy. I feel like I’ve had a kind of awakening. In all my years of writing, I’ve never had more fun.

"I wanted to write about Wisconsin,” Nickolas Butler says of the genesis of his soulful first novel, Shotgun Lovesongs, which gave voice to his homesickness.

“My first semester at the [Iowa] Writers' Workshop, I was down there alone. I was sleeping in this terrible apartment,” Butler says. Picture a fire-engine-red lower section of a bunk bed borrowed from his brother-in-law, a white table borrowed from his mother-in-law, and a folding chair, the only furnishings in the Iowa City apartment where Butler lived from Monday to Thursday before returning to his family.

“I missed my wife; I missed my son; I was just overcome by loneliness and homesickness,” he recalls. “I was sitting at that table, thinking about my hometown, and I started writing. The first 35 pages came basically in one sitting.”

Those opening pages are told from the point of view of Henry “Hank” Brown, who, with his wife Beth and their two young children, struggles to maintain a family farm on the outskirts of a tiny Wisconsin town named Little Wing. Hank’s is one of five voices that tell this story of contemporary small-town Wisconsin life and of close friendships disrupted by the passage of time.

“There’s a little bit of me in every character,” Butler says during a call that reaches him at his home in Fall Creek, Wisconsin, a hamlet outside of Eau Claire, where he grew up. “Hank is probably the moral, ethical side of me. He’s got this strong moral compass. He’s the most boring character in the book for me, frankly. Because basically he’s not going to do anything wrong, and that’s not super exciting.”

Small-town Wisconsin roots link five longtime friends in Butler's lyrical novel.

Most readers won’t actually agree with Butler’s assessment of Hank’s boredom factor. Hank is the novel’s true north, an intelligent, observant exemplar of the best of Midwestern values. He is in many ways a far better man than his close childhood friend, turned not-so-close friend, Leland  “Lee” Sutton, who under the nom de musique Corvus has become an international rock star. Lee’s first album—“Shotgun Lovesongs”—was recorded in a converted chicken coop outside of Little Wing and gives the novel its title. Lee’s ill-advised confession to Hank leads to one of the bigger disruptions among boyhood friends in Little Wing.

The character of Leland has also already brought some national media attention to Shotgun Lovesongs because of Butler’s real-life relationship with Justin Vernon, founder of the Grammy-winning band Bon Iver. Butler went to high school with Vernon, so some early readers have assumed that Leland is a thinly veiled representation of Vernon. Butler says he hasn’t spoken to Vernon in 18 years.

“You have to understand that in this community there was no template for artistic success before him. Justin gave a lot of us this sense of confidence that we could go out and do something different. So the character Leland is inspired by him, but he’s obviously not based on him. Justin has never been shot in the leg, and I don’t think he’s even ever been married. One thing that sets him apart from so many other people is that he went away, gained success, and then came home. He’s really involved in the community. Being homesick for Eau Claire and thinking about its landscape, he was a really nice way to get into all of that.”

Still, Butler says there’s much more of himself than Vernon in the character of Lee. “The story of Lee’s first album is a lot about the pressure I felt with this book. I was nearing the end of grad school. I’d had a string of terrible jobs that never paid any money at all and were at times dangerous, and I didn’t want to go back to that. I had a young kid, and I just wanted to be something more. So I felt a great pressure and urgency to write the book.”

Through Lee’s and Hank’s difficulties with each other, Shotgun Lovesongs vividly portrays the tensions that sometimes develop in male friendships as people grow away from high school and college and into adulthood.

“I’m hitting a point in my life when some of the easy friendships are becoming more difficult because of all the different real-world pressures: money, marriage, kids and jobs,” Butler says. “All of a sudden friends begin wondering why it’s so easy for somebody and so difficult for somebody else to make money. Why is it easy for couple A to have kids when couple B can’t? Something happens when these sorts of jealousies get overlaid on long-term friendships. I was experiencing a little bit of that in my life and was wondering why.”

"For me it was important to say, hey, this is the face of small-town America right now. It’s not what you think.”

Butler’s novel also voices an emphatic love song to what he calls “my place on earth,” and to small-town life in general. Not that Butler is unaware of the difficulties and of the changing nature of America’s small towns. Several characters in the novel end up leaving for greater opportunities in Chicago or Minneapolis. Lee for a while lives in a rural boarding house with Mexican laborers. “I don’t think it’s offensive to say, but a lot of the work being done around here is not being done by natural-born American citizens. It’s being done by really hardworking Mexican people, and that’s not something I’ve seen in literature. For me it was important to say, hey, this is the face of small-town America right now. It’s not what you think.”

For a number of years while he made his weekly trips to Iowa, Butler and his wife, an attorney and “a voracious reader,” and their son lived in the Twin Cities area. As he was revising the novel, the couple had a second child. Butler says they had been saving for years to return to the Eau Claire area, where his wife had also grown up. With the sale of the novel, last August they bought their house and 16 acres of land in Fall Creek. “My kids have all four grandparents within a 10-minute drive,” Butler says. “You can’t beat that.”

And despite the fact that it is 18 below zero outside when we begin our conversation, Butler says, “This world that I inhabit is important to me. It is beautiful to me. . . . I feel extremely fortunate now. I do feel like I’m kind of living inside a dream.”

It’s hard to say whether Ruth Reichl is best known for her scrumptiously honest memoirs (Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me with Apples, Garlic and Sapphires) or her long stints as restaurant reviewer for the New York Times and editor of Gourmet magazine.

But one thing’s for sure: Reichl’s first novel—which comes after a career focused on nonfiction—is well worth the wait. Delicious! tells the story of Billie Breslin, a young woman who moves to New York to pursue a career in food writing and escape her sad life in California. She lands a gig assisting the famous editor of Delicious!, a venerable food magazine on the brink of closing in the midst of the recession. Billie dives into the world of Manhattan cuisine, becoming fast friends with the magazine’s flamboyant travel writer, Sammy, who persuades her to lose the thick glasses and frumpy clothes she’s hidden behind for years.

Reichl weaves real-life chef James Beard into the story of a young assistant at a failing food magazine.

When Billie discovers a treasure trove of World War II correspondence between James Beard and a young girl named Lulu, she knows she has found something special. But the rest of the letters have been elaborately hidden by a long-forgotten Delicious! staff librarian, and when the magazine is abruptly shuttered, Billie and Sammy race to crack the code to find them before the Delicious! building is sold.

One doesn’t reach the career heights Reichl has without taking chances, but the idea of writing a novel daunted her for many years.

“I’m truly a slave to fiction,” Reichl says in an early spring interview from her home in snowy upstate New York. “I can’t imagine being alive and not having books to read. It’s always been my greatest joy—diving into someone else’s world. But I was afraid that I couldn’t do it. I always said if I didn’t have a day job, I could do it. Then all of a sudden, I didn’t have a day job.”

Reichl is referring, of course, to the closure of Gourmet in 2009 due to declining ad revenue, after she’d been at the helm for 10 years. It was, she said, the best job she’s ever had, one that she plans to write about in a future memoir.

“It was sort of everything that I could have imagined,” she says. “I was surrounded by people who cared passionately about the subject. It was a time in American life where other people were starting to care about food as much as I did. We just said, let’s push the envelope as much as we can.”

With the magazine closed, Reichl branched out to other projects. She is a judge on Bravo’s “Top Chef Masters,” and has hosted food programming on PBS. 

She also realized that the time had come to make good on her pledge to write fiction.

“To me, nonfiction is kind of getting in the shower and deciding how you’re going to go that day,” Reichl says. “After 40-something years, it’s natural to me. Fiction is way harder. It involves a lot of waiting.”

Reichl found a cookbook from the 1940s filled with rationing recipes (“truly awful”) and directions for victory gardens. World War II must have been in her subconscious, because shortly afterward, she got her inspiration.

“It was really a gift,” she recalls. “I walked into a library, and I had a fully formed image of finding letters from a little girl to James Beard during World War II. I sat down and wrote them all. Lulu was a gift who came to me. The rest of the book formed around her.”

"When I thought about what this book was, it was very much about how food connects us across time and space. . . . In some ways, this book is a thank you to James Beard for all he did for Marion Cunningham.”

Reichl actually knew Beard, the cook and author who is widely credited with growing America’s love of cuisine. She was also a close friend of Marion Cunningham, the food writer who served as Beard’s longtime assistant.

“When I thought about what this book was, it was very much about how food connects us across time and space,” Reichl says. “He just seemed like the obvious person. He was extremely generous to his readers, and he is someone I think who might very well have become entranced with a Lulu. In some ways, this book is a thank you to James Beard for all he did for Marion Cunningham.”

It could be argued that the book is also a love letter to New York City. One of the best parts of Delicious! is its very specific, lovingly rendered depiction of Manhattan, from Billie’s office in a gorgeous Federal-style mansion to a hip boutique under the High Line to a fantastic cheese shop tucked into a city block. Readers can practically hear the taxi horns.

“I am a New Yorker to my core,” Reichl declares. “I grew up in Greenwich Village. One of the great joys of my life is wandering New York City—just getting on the subway and getting off somewhere and wandering.”

Since the novel is about a food writer at a famous New York magazine that is suddenly shut down, Reichl understands if readers assume the story is autobiographical. But it most emphatically is not, she says. Billie’s path may mirror Reichl’s in some ways, but that is where the similarity ends, Reichl insists.

“My biggest problem was in focusing so hard on making Billie not like me, I wasn’t letting her be herself,” Reichl says. “I had to get out of my own way. I had to get used to sitting quietly and just letting Billie be herself.”

Billie starts her time in New York as a mousy assistant, uncertain and still smarting from a tragedy she is unwilling to come to grips with. But she comes into her own as the book unfolds, taking on writing assignments, making friends, exploring the city and even finding romance. She is a wholly likable character, and the supporting players at the magazine and in Billie’s neighborhood are a hoot. The letters from Lulu are sweet and evocative (although Billie and Sammy’s search for them drags on a bit too long), and the mouthwatering food descriptions throughout the book are vintage Reichl (she even makes roasted pig’s ears sound appetizing).

Delicious! is like a family-style meal around a big table: fun, loud, at times messy and, ultimately, completely satisfying.

This article was originally published in the May 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In a world where writers are eternally reminded to “write what you know,” debut novels are often thinly veiled memoirs, or at least tentatively tied to the author’s own experience through location or life experience. Not so for screenwriter Laline Paull, whose ambitious first novel, The Bees, doesn’t feature a single human character—and it’s set in the labyrinthine world of the hive. There, worker bee Flora 717 discovers she’s also able to lay eggs, a one in 10,000 anomaly that draws the notice of the queen as well as some unseen complications. We asked Paull, who lives in London, a few questions about the inspiration behind this remarkable first book.

Novels that portray animals as human-like in their thoughts and desires aren’t unheard of—from Watership Down to The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore—but insects are an unusual choice. Where did the idea for The Bees come from?
I made a new friend who was a beekeeper, and then I found out that her cancer had returned, and she died soon afterwards. She had a very beautiful conscious death and wrote her own funeral service, in which she mentioned her bees. In the immediate aftermath of her death and as a way of honouring her, I started to read about bees. And then something amazing happened. What had started as a way to try to keep close to someone who had gone became a genuine fascination with the most miraculous creature that is the honeybee. One extraordinary fact led to another, and within a week I was absolutely hooked on finding out more, and then, convinced someone must have seen the dramatic potential for a novel set in a beehive. I combed the Internet, then when I couldn’t find one, raced to make it mine.

How has writing The Bees changed the way you look at insects, flowers? What surprised you the most in your research about bees?
The more I found out about the natural world and the genius all around us that is so far beyond human invention, the more awestruck I became. I can see why scientists become abstracted and obsessed—I certainly did for a while, during my research. Even today I have to stop and watch a bee foraging. Today in my garden I saw a fantastic big bumblebee queen house-hunting for a good site to make a burrow. I watched her for so long that my coffee was cold when I went back to it. And the most surprising thing about my research into bees was getting in touch with that feeling of child-like wonder when you look at the world and think: Wow!

The hive is such a complex structure, like a cathedral or castle. Did you have any architectural model in mind when you were creating it?
I’m so glad that that aspect of the book succeeds—I worked very hard to make the hive feel real and knowable. I looked at the floor plans of 5th-century B.C. Minoan palaces, I thought about the Tower of London, I looked at oil rigs, cathedrals. I thought about the infrastructure of a massive luxury hotel, and the staff required to keep those penthouse suites going, I thought about ocean liners—but in the end, I had to turn the hive on its side to make all the verticals horizontals, to be more familiar to a reader—and easier to write. The topography of the hive took me a long time and many bad drawings to get right. My 11-year-old stepson helped me; he’s a good cartoonist. I did one scribbled map that worked, not pretty, but accurate—and I stuck with that.

"I worked very hard to make the hive feel real and knowable. I looked at the floor plans of 5th-century B.C. Minoan palaces, I thought about the Tower of London, I looked at oil rigs, cathedrals. I thought about the infrastructure of a massive luxury hotel . . ."

Flora is a classic heroine—she is loyal to her kin and to her hive, yet is willing to risk her life to try new things. She stands for both tradition and change. Can you talk about creating her?
The key to writing Flora came when I found out in my research about the real fact of the laying worker, a one in 10,000 anomaly in the hive. I imagined being devout and orderly and never questioning the status quo—and then you find you’re pregnant. You become a sinner, a traitor, and yet you’ve never felt such love in your life—and how can that possibly be wrong? It was the ultimate opposition of instinct and duty, and that makes for great drama. And I’m a mother too, so I know that the law would mean nothing if your child’s life was at stake.

 "It was the ultimate opposition of instinct and duty, and that makes for great drama."

You write about the communication between the bees but also about their emotional states. Do you think insects are capable of feeling and thought?
Ah, I am not sure at all about that. We know that insects are irresistibly attracted to flowers, to what we, with our supposed “higher” consciousness, think of as beauty. Flowers are the sex organs of plants, pollen the sperm. Nectar, the lure to bring in the pollinators. Might insects feel some sort of arousal, at the sight of beauty? Men do. Might insects feel lust for each other? Why choose to mate with one, not another of their kind? The honest answer is I have no idea if insects can think and feel—but intuitively I feel they must, if not in any way that we can understand. I suppose I wrote The Bees in response to that very question.

Did you read other books about utopias and dystopias before writing The Bees? What other dystopian fictions or film would you recommend?
The Bees has been called a dystopia, and I suppose it is, but I didn’t conceive of it as such. I love books like Brave New World by the great Aldous Huxley, and of course 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell. I love most things Margaret Atwood writes, and I also love Mervyn Peake’s Ghormenghast. I was addicted to” Game of Thrones” on television while I was writing, so fantasy worlds are clearly attractive to me. And I bend the knee to JG Ballard—High-Rise, in particular.

Utopias I think are rather dull, compared to their opposites. We like to look over the wall of law and order, manners and good behavior. We like to see the wild side let out.

In what ways was writing a novel different than a screenplay? What surprised you about the process?
Compared to a screenplay, writing a novel was both harder and easier. I found it incredibly liberating to be able to tell as well as show, and I found that the discipline of working with story and visual images very useful in writing the novel. I love both forms—film and book. But the novel exists on its own terms—the screenplay still needs interpretation to truly live.

What’s next for you?
My next novel is set in the natural world again, as a character in itself, but also as the arena for much human conflict. More than that I don’t want to say right now, only because the spell is still binding.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Bees.

British author Emma Healey may be only 29 years old, but she has created a poignant portrait of a woman with dementia in her luminous debut novel, which contains a double mystery.

Was there a specific inspiration for the character of Maud?
Although my father’s mother, Nancy, has dementia and her experiences gave me ideas for some of the scenes in the book, it was my mother’s mother, Vera, who most influenced the character of Maud. Vera died in 2008, before I’d gotten very far into writing Elizabeth Is Missing, but her voice is very like Maud’s. In fact my mother recently rediscovered a tape recording of Vera, telling stories about her childhood, and I was surprised at how alike the two voices are: both slightly jokey, sometimes irritable, curious about people and full of detail.

You are in your 20s—how did you get yourself into the mindset of a pensioner with dementia?
I’m not sure I know, but that process was certainly the interest the book held for me. Writing as Maud was incredibly freeing, as I knew readers wouldn’t immediately assume her thoughts were mine or that her life was a thinly veiled version of my own.

Similarly, you obviously weren’t alive in the 1940s! How did you research that part of the book?
Part of that was down to the stories from Vera, which I’d written down during her lifetime, but I also read a lot of postwar British fiction, as well as nonfiction, published diaries and old newspapers. I watched old films (both feature films and Pathé newsreels) and spoke to anyone I knew who could remember that time.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that you were courted by publishers who wanted this novel. How did that feel?
It was very strange indeed, overwhelming but brilliant. Like most new writers, I could only hope that one day one publisher might agree to publish one of my books; I couldn’t imagine several publishers all wanting to buy the first book I’d written. It was very difficult to decide on which publisher to go with— they were all lovely and well-respected and all had great ideas. In the end, I went with the publisher whose vision for the book most nearly matched my own.

Many authors are active on social media, but your stop-motion book videos on Vine are so unique! How does that creative outlet compare to writing?
Thank you! My UK publishers told me about Vine, and as soon as they described the app I was keen to try it out.

They are quite different. Writing is the thing that pervades my whole day—I’m always wondering how I might describe something or improve my understanding, I’m constantly trying to remember an eavesdropped conversation or an idea for a story. Whereas the Vines are spur-of-the-moment and just for fun. They are wonderfully refreshing to make in that respect—taking a matter of hours rather than years.

What are you working on next?
While I was writing Elizabeth Is Missing, and struggling with the intricacies of the plot, I told myself the next book would be really simple and linear and I’d have it all worked out before I set down a single word. Now that I’m trying to begin the second book, I’ve found I have no facility for that, so I already have a very complicated novel plan. I’m still experimenting with voice at the moment, but I’m also, once again, exploring themes around memory and how the past and present interlink. 

Author photo credit Martin Figura.

This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a review of this book.